This week in energy we’re looking at the grand opening in Iowa of the first facility to commercially produce ethanol from corn waste products as proof that we don’t need to divert corn from the food supply or livestock feed, writes James Stafford. Under the umbrella of the government-backed “Project Liberty”, the Iowa plant is the first ever to produce cellulosic ethanol specifically from corn waste, and the second in the US to commercially produce cellulosic ethanol from agricultural waste.
So far, the largest biofuels efforts have involved the age-old process of converting sugars in plants into ethanol. If biofuels are ever to make a significant dent in fossil fuel use, however, they’re probably going to have to be made from something that can’t also be used as food (either by us or our farm animals.) That means working with something other than sugar. The leading candidate is cellulose, a robust polymer of sugars that give plants the strength to grow several hundred feet tall. Breaking down cellulose into sugars (which can then be converted into ethanol) is not easy to do economically, although a lot of research has gone into finding processes that work. A leading candidate for this is to use the enzymes from bacteria and fungi that normally decompose wood. The US Energy Information Agency has announced that the nation’s first commercial-scale plant based on this approach has just opened in Iowa.
